NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal
Article Materials Project

This joint project from NISO and NFAIS (the National Federation of Advanced Information Services) aims to develop a Recommended Practice for publisher inclusion, handling, display, and preservation of supplemental journal article materials.

To achieve this goal, three groups have been established to undertake the work:

Stakeholders Interest Group
Stakeholders to be kept apprised of the development of the Recommended Practice. Members serve as a source of feedback on document drafts, and they would provide community vetting of a final document. The group list is open; anyone who would like to track the progress of this project and would like to potentially provide feedback on draft work can sign up by visiting: www.niso.org/lists/suppinfo

Business Working Group
This small group is tasked with drafting recommendations related to the semantic aspects of the topic for inclusion in the Recommended Practice. Questions include: What are the semantic aspects? What are the definitions? What are the recommended roles for the stakeholders in this arena? What are the business practices?

Technical Working Group
This small group will look at the syntactic, structural issues related to supplemental materials in order to develop recommendations around these to be included in the final publication. Members will address issues such as syntax, linking, interoperability, markup, and metadata.

The Business and Technical working group co-chairs meet monthly to ensure that there is shared communication between the groups and their work is coordinated.

This project follows on the recommendation made by attendees at the January 2010 joint NISO/NFAIS meeting on this topic, held at the APA offices in Washington, DC. To see a copy of the meeting report, visit www.niso.org/topics/tl/supplementary/.